Friday 13 May 2011
A beautiful morning up at 0630 and into the kitchen to get the coffee brewing. Today is the long awaited departure date for the next mission trip to Kenya. Bad weather is forecast for late morning and early afternoon so I am up to try to get those last late minute items done that should have been done last week. The girls, Sadie and Molly our dogs were glad to see me as I gave them fresh water, food and scratch behind the ears. They act like that they know what is going on, glad someone does.
The restrictions on weight and size of luggage were a concern so I took my two pieces of luggage to the Pinson Animal Clinic and using their large scales weighted the luggage. One was 47 and the other 53. There were still some adjustments to make since they can only weigh 50 pounds without penalty. The problem was the large sink that I had in the one overweight case. You have heard of carrying everything including the kitchen sink well this was a bathroom sink for Chris’s, good friend from Kenya that will be on the trip with us. Chris is building a Mission House in Nairobi and these 6 sinks that we are carrying will go in that house. Nancy had similar problems with hers but one of her pieces was a whopping 63 pounds. Do we leave the sink in Birmingham or doing something else? We swapped luggage and took care of 7 or the 13 pounds and the other went into carryon luggage. It is always fun when you are carrying such items as sinks and enough cake decorating supplies to make many fancy cakes. The cake items with be going to Susan in Njoro.
The storm came, bad winds, heavy rains, lightening, and thunder and it did not appear to be a real problem until a good friend Steve came to carry us to the airport. All the traffic lights in the 6 miles to the interstate were off and it was at a snail pace. We decided to detour, and as it goes detours are often not the shortest way but after detouring twice on the detour we did make our way to the Parkway and on to the airport. Thanks for Steve carrying us.
Made the airport all bags were checked and we are ready to go. There were 5 of us going to Kenya this year where we will meet Chris. It was a great pleasure that our daughter Anna came to see us off as well as Liz with her two sons Tanner and Reed. Liz is Jim and Mary’s daughter.
On board the aircraft, overweight, so that had to refigure and load new data into the flight processing unit. Good flight late into Detroit but while I was getting the Carryon picked up Nancy went and got the Delta agent to call our gate and tell them that we were on the way. We made it and boarded the aircraft, an A300, with not vacant seats. Made it to Amsterdam and all is well. Waiting on our flight to Nairobi and it is 3:45 (Birmingham Time in the morning 14 May 2011)
No comments:
Post a Comment